Wal-mart Suit: It's About All Of Us

June 27, 2004|By Dan Haar

Lots of impressive numbers and shocking accusations aired this past week in the coast-to-coast lawsuit charging Wal-Mart Stores with discrimination against women, and they tell a hefty part of the story.

Two-thirds of the chain's hourly workers are women, but 85 percent of store managers are men; women, demeaned as "girls" earning extra pay rather than supporting families, are systematically paid less than men; some female managers have been forced to attend meetings at Hooters restaurants, and even strip clubs.

Buried in the lawsuit is a less sexy but equally telling quote from testimony by Rhonda Harper, a former marketing vice president at Sam's Club, Wal-Mart's not-so-little-brother warehouse store. She was explaining why, as an outside recruit to Sam's, she had trouble fitting into the famous Wal-Mart culture.

"I didn't go hunting with them, I didn't go fishing with them, I wondered if I had been able to do some of those things if I might have assimilated more quickly into the organization."

Hunting and fishing, hmmm. That would put most of us urban Yankees, male or female, right out on our khaki-covered keisters.

The point is that Dukes et. al. v. Wal-Mart -- which became the largest private discrimination case in history Tuesday when a California federal judge certified it as a class action -- cracks open deep issues even beyond how women fare on the job.

It's about members of the club vs. outsiders, whoever they are.

It's about a company that wants to break the old rules of pricing and supply chains, but keep an old-style, paternal corporate grip in place -- no grousing, and certainly no unions.

It is, like the historic civil rights cases of the '50s and '60s, about all of us, not just one company.

Wal-Mart is, after all, not only the world's largest company, with $256 billion in sales last year. If sales were gross domestic product, the Bentonville, Ark.-based discounter would rank 31st among nations, bigger than Saudi Arabia, Switzerland and Sweden. Maybe Wal-Mart should host an Olympics; it's bigger than Greece.

"At one level, certainly this is a company which, in some respects, reflects biases that operate elsewhere in society," said Joseph M. Sellers, head of the civil rights practice at Cohen, Milstein, Housfeld and Toll in Washington, and a lead attorney in the Wal-Mart case.

He's circumspect about the broad issues because the case hinges on specific questions of how Wal-Mart treated women. His goal -- far from saying society is rife with injustice and Wal-Mart is a part of it all -- is to paint Wal-Mart as a rogue player whose culture is anti-woman at its core.

It doesn't have to be one or the other, though. The case attacks a company that, at the very least, hasn't done enough to help women advance equally. That's clear from the numbers. But it's also a window, or a mirror, that shows a broader pattern of inequity.

Bosses promote and give the best work to the people they feel most comfortable with. That can be fine; we don't want private industry tied to a test-based system that mimics civil-service exams. But left unchecked, the Wal-Mart method -- advancement based on what the lawsuit calls a "tap on the shoulder" selection process -- quickly spells widespread injustice.

"I see these cases often involving top executives who want to maintain control, and who don't want to let into the club people who are not like themselves," Sellers said.

There's a common phrase for it, he said: The "similar-to-me phenomenon," which companies are supposed to keep in check.

And so, far beyond the outcome in this mammoth case -- which involves 1.6 million women who work or have worked for Wal-Mart since the end of 1998 -- the question looms: How will the results of this case play out for other employees at other companies?

The case against Wal-Mart seems compelling. The statistics alone are powerful, with just 33 percent of Wal-Mart management female in an industry that the lawsuit says is 55 percent managed by women. In addition, lawyers have collected more than 100 declarations and depositions from women, telling stories of professional heartbreak.

In Connecticut, one person, Dawn Hittle of Clinton, has signed a declaration about her Wal-Mart experience. She joined Wal-Mart in 1993 with the goal of managing a store after earning a master's degree in business administration. While working as assistant manager in the Branford and Norwich stores, with strong evaluations, she applied for 10 store manager jobs and had just two interviews.

"All 10 jobs were filled by men," she said in her statement.

She returned to work after a six-month maternity leave in January 2000 as co-manager of the Cromwell store, eager to make the next step. "However, my hopes were soon crushed," she said, as she was relegated to "secretarial tasks such as opening mail and filing."

Hittle resigned five months later after learning that her pay, $43,000 a year, was the lowest amount allowed for co-managers, her statement said.